OF DARKNESS is an experimental Funeral Doom Metal band from Barcelona, Spain,. Their music includes the most representative traits of the genre, along with other varied influences such as ambient, industrial and classical music. Highly atmospheric and deep, their sound is the perfect landscape for their extreme nihilistic beliefs.

OF DARKNESS is formed in 2003 by Bastard and Julkarn (Graveyard) and released their first demo “Death” a few months after. In 2004, the entities behind the band started working on a new work, “The Empty Eye”, which was released in 2005. Around that time, several labels showed interest in both records: Goatowarex Records from Australia and Xtreem Music from Spain. None of those deals came to a good end so the band stayed on hold for a few years until Psychedelic Lotus Order from China and Black Mass Records from Spain decided to give a second chance to both records re-releasing them on limited vinyl and CD. Now that the creature has got the respect it deserves, OF DARKNESS is ready to unleash some new requiems and oratories.

Until now, I'm guessing that few have heard the first two releases from the mysterious Spanish duo Of Darkness, since they were both self-released demos that were only modestly circulated through black/doom channels over the past couple of years, and despite attempts at giving them a more formal release have been largely unavailable until now. Thanks to Black Mass Records, fans of severely drugged death/doom can finally hear the collected recordings from Of Darkness, and it's some of the most awesomely fucked-up, hallucinatory doom that I've listened to since the first two Esoteric albums. I'm serious - when I first heard this band after Black Mass got in touch and turned me on to them, I was blown away by how horrific and psychedelic these recordings are; slow and crawling Lovecraftian blackdoom that the band layers with all kinds of droning keys, weird howling vocals, bizarre fragmented melodies and effects, strings, and molded into unpredictable arrangements that allow the glacial riffs to crumble away suddenly and without warning into vast spaces of pure blackness. One of the guys in Of Darkness also plays in the cool prog/folk/black metal band Lux Divina, whose latest album just came out on Ars Magna, but this is about as far from Lux Divina's folk-inflected prog as you can possibly get; this is monstrous, mind-melting deathdoom drenched in cadaverous fumes and ghastly black psychedelia, bestial black funeral rites from Beyond, somewhere between the glacial dread of bands like Evoken, Esoteric, Thergothon, Skepticism, Until Death Overtakes Me, and Worship, and the lysergic industrial-tinged horror of Blut Aus Nord, Gnaw Their Tongues, OS, Habsyll, Skitliv, and Slagmaur. Seriously fucking recommended if yer into utterly blackened, warped doom.

The first disc features the two song Death demo from 2004, the first track "Death" unfurling it's massive black wings over a half-hour sprawl of swarming black metal guitars over plodding glacial drums that are little more than a minimal metronomic pulse, thick waves of blackened doom, dissonant riffing, high-end metallic drone, impossibly deep and gaseous vokills drifting through dank, lightless catacombs, the sound seeming to warp slightly, the riffs and vocals slightly shifting in pitch, making this sound even more woozy and hallucinogenic. Bells toll in the distance as the riff changes into another grim doom dirge, more ambient than metal, but suffocating, heavy and dense. As the song progresses, the sound drops into fearsome stretches of psychedelic ambience with whooshing demonic vocals and weird flanging effects, then plunges back into the funereal gloom as electronic keys and choral voices emerge from the depths. Strange stretches of orchestral clatter and abstract strings surface, along with the chittering and clacking of what sounds like bats (!) and random screams and howls of torment appear for several minutes, and then become swept over with another black riff, another black wave of hellish black orchestral doom strewn with creepy pipe organs, harpsichords, and clusters of random piano notes. More like some super-slow abyssal black metal than doom metal at times, this is seriously evil and warped stuff. The other track off of the demo is even more abstract, starting with moaning and anguished shrieks drifting up out of the blackness, drenched in reverb, becoming more terrifying as the moans change into cackling and snarling vokills, and then the MASSIVE doom riff drops in, all crushing torpor and black majesty, the guitars subtly harmonized. More buzzing tremolo riffs appear, as well as passages where everything drops out except for the plodding drums and the ghostly shrieks.

But it's on the second disc, The Empty Eye, where Of Darkness really come into their own. Recorded in 2005 as their debut album but unreleased until now, the sound is WAY heavier, better recorded, but still just as hopelessly grim and dismal as before. The seven tracks move through massive monolithic doom riffs, psychotic snarling vokills, frenzied guttural gibberish, the minimal, sparse drums that are little more than a metronomic cymbal crash and heartbeat-like bass drum depth charge boomf every few seconds, and thick droning cinematic synths humming in the background. There's more of an industrial feel here too, with thick swathes of distorted noise sweeping into the creeping doomdirge, and strange electronic sounds woven into the decomposing riffs; metallic crashing sounds and swirling low-end drones manifest at the outer edges of the monotonous black crush, and weird processed spoken-word vocals recite christ-knows-what over sudden swells of abyssal black drone. Tolling bells, orchestral strings, multiple voices whispering at one, and frantic chanting drift above the static riffs, and all sorts of mysterious scraping and clanking and dragging noises can be heard in the distance; there's even what sounds like a xylophone that appears on one song, the clinking metallic notes chiming over a crushing epic doomdeath riff and booming tympani-like percussion. Imagine Esoteric being commissioned to score a psychedelic horror film, or Thergothon backed by a crew of chanting, muttering satanic high priests and acid-dosed synth players. Phenomenally fucked and soul-crushing avant-acid-blackdoom!